by C. P. Odom
“Anyway,” Sandra continued, “the colonel ordered Cleary to go ahead and hand out everything left from the last airdrop. After we got our stuff, Cleary and his two men grabbed their pieces[1] and chicken plates[2] and headed over to Third Bat. They’re even worse off than we are.”
[1] Rifles
[2] Body armor inserts.
“And God knows we’re plenty bad. Second Bat started with 970 effectives, and now we’re down to 74—about the size of two platoons. But Third Bat’s somewhere around 60. Actually, according to the book, neither of our so-called battalions should be able to function with this many casualties.”
“I’m shocked, shocked, to hear you say such a thing, Gunny! I know your reverence for the official Marine Manual. You’d probably be reading it right now if you didn’t have your chick lit.”
They both shared tired grins before McDunn cocked his head at PFC Smith.
“Anything else, Smitty?”
“Nah, Gunny. I mean, sir!”
McDunn shook his head with a smile and waved him on his way. Smith was a lifetime marine, and he’d been up and down the ranks. He’d even gotten as high as sergeant once, but that was in combat. Out of combat, he was a handful: drinking, fighting, gambling. Combat stripes soon disappeared once back at base. But he was good in combat. Short, skinny, and mean—a good marine. In combat.
Turning to Sandra, McDunn said, “During my first hitch, we used to joke about anything worth shooting was worth shooting twice, because ammo was cheap while life was expensive. Now every round is worth its weight in gold.”
“Yeah,” she said with a humorless smile. “I know what you mean, even though I’m just a pill pusher.”
“Oh, you’re not too bad with your piece, Dancer,” McDunn said with a grin and a wink. “Your personnel file says you qualified as Sharpshooter. Not as good as Expert, like moi, but still better than in the old days before they moved your MOS[1] from the Navy to the Corps. That must have been weird, to have squids[2] handing out Band-Aids to us grunts. Though I’ve heard the old-timers talk about how much marines used to love their corpsman and how corpsmen never had to buy their own drinks on liberty.”
[1] Military Occupational Specialty
[2] Sailors in the US Navy.
“When I was going to Pharmacist Mate School in San Antonio, the Navy lifers used to talk about working with ‘those lunatic jarheads.’[1] They didn’t seem to miss the old days much, even if they do have to buy their own drinks these days. I don’t suppose the colonel’s heard anything from the States, has he?”
[1] A nickname for a Marine. It’s considered derogatory coming from anyone who wasn’t in the Corps.
McDunn shook his head. “Nope. Communication’s completely gone. Six months ago, we had dozens of ways to communicate worldwide, but now nothing works, including our military commo. Our equipment depended too much on satellite comm, and it looks like none of the commsats[1] are left. Now we can’t raise anyone at all.”
[1]Communications Satellites
“Bummer.”
McDunn had to smile at her use of the ancient term, but much of the old stuff had been reappearing, showing once more the cyclical nature of life.
“Bummer indeed. Remember how we found a few old-fashioned radio sets during our retreat? Excuse me—our retrograde movement. Trading space for time.”
“Call it like it is, Gunny. Retreat it was. I thought marines never retreated.”
“They do when they’re up against zillions of barbs.”
“Why do you always call those guys ‘barbs’?” Sandra asked, her brow furrowed. “Everyone else calls ’em ‘ragheads’ or worse. Usually a lot worse.”
“Because it’s the more accurate term. It’s not that I’m offended by derogatory and profane name-calling, you understand. I don’t give a crap for the sensitivities of depraved animals who want to cut off our heads. But as an engineer, I prefer accuracy over sloppiness. These guys really are barbarians. The real thing. Tribalists who hate civilization and want to tear it down so they can go back to living like they did centuries ago. The fanatics aren’t even a majority of those we’ve been fighting. More of them are from European countries than from the Middle East.”
“Well, they all fight the same,” Sandra said bitterly. “No tactics or anything. They just charge us until we drop ’em. And they all yell the same kind of stuff—a weird mixture of Middle Eastern and European curses and stuff.”
McDunn shrugged. “That’s about it. They all seem to have a blind, unreasoning hatred of civilization. Wherever they came from, they just want to tear it down and kill all of us. The whole idea of civilization being a good thing has been breaking down for decades, and this is the end result. They’ve become berserkers, ready to die for God-knows-what. So I call ’em barbs because it’s what they are.”
“And you’re right about them really, really wanting to kill us all.”
“With a passion, Dancer, with a passion. Another thing to note is the way all of them are young men, even those from the European countries. They evidently left their families back home to die, and their plan is to enslave all the British men and take their women. Very antediluvian. Everything’s breaking down.”
“Antediluvian? I’ve never heard that one before.”
“It means primitive, archaic, out-of-date.”
“Ah. I thought your degree was in engineering, not in English lit.”
“Nothing says I’m only allowed to read comic books just because I’m an engineer,” McDunn said mildly. “Anyway, once we ran into these bastards and saw their numbers, we had no choice but to back up to keep ’em from surrounding us. At first, we really were trading space for time, as the military tacticians would say, until the rest of the MEB arrived. Then the Brigade and all of Camp Lejeune disappeared in the Massacre—more than twenty nukes going off within minutes of each other and no idea if it was done by terrorists or by some kind of cruise missiles. It’s interesting nobody claimed credit for it. Nobody we know of, that is. Communications with the States was pretty hit-and-miss afterwards.
“So there we were, on our own, but with no relief expected and only a couple of resupply airdrops to keep us going. So we had no choice but to continue retrograding toward the west coast of England, trying desperately to contact someone—anyone—back home to request either reinforcement or evacuation. Neither alternative looked worth a diddly-dam, so now we’re at Cornwall, right at the tip of the peninsula, and there isn’t any more room to retrograde. Trading space for time stops working when you’re out of space.”
“Unfortunately, very true, Gunny. But the word you used, anti…anti-devolution.”
“Antediluvian.”
“Where’d you pick it up? From college?”
“Nope. From reading adventure stories like Conan the Barbarian.”
“Ah! I’ve heard of him. What were you studying in college?”
“Industrial engineering, drinking beer, and chasing girls.”
“I can believe it,” she snorted, “except I think you got the order backwards.”
“Perhaps so,” he said, smiling.
“I’ll bet you wish you were still back there instead of here.”
“Well, somebody had to be here. I wish it hadn’t been me, but I shouldn’t have been as surprised to get my call-up as I was. Despite everything President Davis has done to rebuild the Corps, it’s still a ghost of what it was in my grandfather’s time.”
A shadow crossed his face, and he said, venomously, “That is, the Corps was a ghost of itself. Now, with the Lejeune nuke taking out the rest of the MEB, including all the jarheads pulled in from the west coast, there might not be anything left of the Corps except a few shreds here and there.”
He took a deep breat
h to soothe himself before he continued. “Anyway, when I calmed down after opening the envelope, I knew it was because the brass figured out they were going to need some grunts who’d been around the block. They needed to balance all those newbies I saw coming in just as I was getting my discharge. At least, they gave me back my old rank. Being a gunny again was a lot better than being a PFC.”
“You were a gunny, but only until Captain Edranger bought it in that first firefight outside London. Then you were Captain McDunn.”
“Brevet Captain McDunn, Dancer. Damn. I hadn’t thought of Edranger in a while. Good man, good officer. But unlucky. Gotta be lucky sometimes.”
“Yup. Everyone was really glad to hear Colonel White make the announcement. We all figured you could show those two new-mint butterbars[1] what to do at the very least.”
[1]Second lieutenants. The name comes from their rank insignia, a single gold bar.
Her face clouded up in remembrance, and she muttered, “Except those two didn’t last too much longer than the Captain.”
“What a foul-up this has been from the get-go,” McDunn said, his face grim at the memory of the long, cruel retreat to Cornwall. “Good intentions but really bad intel and no reason for it. The sats[1] were still up when the brass was planning things, and it seems like none of them had any idea what we were heading into. Even if the entire MEB had made it over here, I don’t think we could have stopped the barbs. Not in the long run. Not without massive resupply and reinforcement.”
[1] Satellites
“The people here being so helpless didn’t help,” Sandra said quietly. “Even when we tried to pass out captured weapons, they just didn’t seem able to summon the will to make any effective resistance.”
“The politicos had longer to work on them than in the States, and it was bad enough there. Even a decade and a half of political indoctrination back home wasn’t enough to keep Americans from finally rising up and throwing the bastards out and putting Davis in. The Brits seem really nice, but they could have used a lot more mean, nasty types.”
“Like us, you mean?” Sandra said, smiling.
“Yeah, just like us. People you wouldn’t take home to meet the folks but good guys to guard your back. I remember a quote from some Brit about people being able to sleep safely at night because rough men stood ready to do violence in their name. Who was that? Kipling maybe?”[1]
[1] Actually, it was George Orwell, the author of 1984.
“Don’t ask me, Gunny.”
“No matter,” he said, dismissing the idle thought with a wave of his hand. “How’d we get so far afield? What were we talking about?”
“I think it was the older radios we found.”
“Yeah, right. Even after we got a few of them working, all we could raise were a few ham radio hobbyists in the Midwest. They promised to try to pass the word to the higher-ups, but we never heard anything, and now even they don’t answer.”
“I still wonder who took out the sats. I know it wasn’t us.”
“Nope. We frittered away most of our military capability during the bad years. But most everything, even the commsats way up in geosynchronous orbit, is gone now. No GPS either. Someone obviously had the capability to take ’em out, and my money’s on the Chinese. But they’ve got bigger problems right now. The people are starving to death, and they’re certain someone is to blame. The last we heard, the Blight was spreading through southern China like gangbusters, and the food riots looked more like wars than riots.”
“You think the Blight came from Iran? We know they started everything going downhill by nuking Israel.”
“Probably was Iran. At least, the satellite imagery showed the brown areas centered on their croplands and spreading out. But the Blight was actually in full swing even before the nuke strike. It was just that crop failures in the Middle East have been such a normal occurrence in recent years, no one considered the possibility of a man-made bioweapon at first.”
“Why on earth did they launch it?” Sandra said, shaking her head.
McDunn thought for a minute, reaching up to comb imaginary dirt out of his bushy and rather unkempt moustache, a habit of his while thinking.
“My opinion, for what it’s worth,” he said finally, “is the bioweapon didn’t get launched on purpose. My bet is it got loose through carelessness. Their tech capability—and their discipline—wasn’t nearly as good as they deluded themselves into thinking it was. Their biotech might have managed to create the thing, but it wasn’t good enough to keep it under control. Look how long it took them to develop their nuclear capability.”
“Fat lot of good it did them,” Sandra said acidly. “The Israeli’s intercepted most of their strikes and retaliated, and Iran ceased to exist.”
“True, but then Israel got hit by several more strikes. They got most of those also, but several got through. They got hurt badly, and now they have to worry about fallout and the Blight. I’m afraid the whole Middle East and a good part of Europe bordering the area is either already gone or is on the way out.”
“That sounds like you think the whole world might be coming to an end!” Sandra said incredulously. “I’ve never heard you this pessimistic!”
“It’s too late in the game to fool ourselves, Dancer,” he said, letting his weariness and despair out for the first time to the one person he was certain he could trust. “The whole world has screwed up royally this time, and it may not be able to recover. What if the Blight spreads to the Americas? The military wasn’t the only thing we Americans degraded during the bad years when the fanatics were trying to redesign our whole society. Both the physical and the biological sciences took a hit as well. The folks back home might have no more success stopping the Blight than anyone else.”
“And that’s assuming there are any folks back home. They may all be dead already, which is why they don’t answer us.”
“The colonel thinks there’ve been some more nukes, but I’m kind of dubious,” McDunn said. “I lean toward the possibility everything’s breaking down toward anarchy or even civil war.”
“That’s a horrifying thought. I really thought we were on the way to rebuilding things, at least up until the Massacre. Still, I can’t help getting angry with whoever or whatever’s left stateside. Even if they can’t hear us, they ought to know we’re still here and could send ships to pull us out.”
“There may not be much left since the nukes took out most of the east coast. There can’t be many ships left, even if they wanted to get us out. There weren’t many available to bring us over here, not after twenty years of deliberate neglect. And with virtually all of the government, including the heart of our military, converted to ash, who’s left to get our messages, much less respond to them?”
“I have this dream,” Sandra said, looking at McDunn wistfully. “We hear jet engines and look up to see a flight of C-17’s sweeping in.”
“I’m afraid that’s even more doubtful than the ships,” McDunn said, shaking his head dolefully. “The Air Force general in Oklahoma who arranged the last drop told the colonel he was scraping the bottom of the barrel for it. Now, he doesn’t answer either, and with half of his C-17’s getting hit by SAMs from the tanker before they even dropped their load, who’d be willing to stage a repeat? We’re lucky we got what we did. Those Air Force pukes showed real cojones to keep on coming when the smoke trails started filling the skies.”
“Damn the Iranians,” Sandra said venomously. “It must have been them on the tanker, but who’d have ever thought they’d infiltrate a tanker before we even got here? It looked like it was abandoned, and we sure never saw any signs of life.”
“At least we found a use for the old Javelin we’d been hauling around since we ran into the barbs outside London.”
“I was amazed it still worked,” Sandra said.
“Not half as amazed as those bastards had to have been when they saw it launch. I don’t think the tanker had much oil left, but it had enough to take care of any of them who survived the strike.”
“I’m kind of ashamed to admit I hoped some of the guys off the tanker would make it ashore. I really, really wanted to line them up against the wall. It really hurt to see those big birds unable to avoid the SAMs.”
“The drop was a shoestring operation. The C-17’s barely had the fuel to make the round trip, even with tankers, and they had to come in low to make the drop, which brought them into SAM range.”
“Damn, damn, damn!”
“Yeah, I know. One thought I’ve had, and it isn’t a pleasant one, is there might still be somebody hearing us back home, and he’s made a cold-blooded decision not to respond. There’s an old military maxim that says, ‘Don’t reinforce failure.’ Our efforts here have certainly been a failure.”
“But we took out so many! Thirty, fifty times what we lost!”
“But the barbs have the people to lose. We don’t. They’re still seizing ships and heading here—we’ve heard some of those messages. The animals coming at us may not like or trust each other much, and they may fight each other to the death after they’ve killed all of us, but they hate us more. Plus, we’re the only organized military force left in England. The last of the Brit military went under months ago.”
The two digested their unpalatable situation; then McDunn stirred. “You got any more good news, Dancer?”
“Yeah,” Sandra said, her teeth flashing in her usual brilliant smile, and McDunn struggled to hide his sudden difficulty in breathing. “The surgeon finally decided the situation’s become serious enough she needed to know how to load and fire the rifle the colonel made her carry. After I picked up what little she had for me in the way of med supplies, I gave her some quickie instructions on making sure the pointy part of the cartridge points into the chamber as well as how to change a magazine.”